Celine: A Biography

by Patrick McCarthy

"A very solid achievement, a book that deserves to be ready by anyone interested in modern French literature""The Financial Times. "McCarthy has written the best account of Celine's life and books we have had" New Review While this work in no way tries to rehabilitate Celine, by its sobriety and fairness it offers us, for the first time, a dispassionate portrait of one of the most enigmatic literary figures of the century.

Genres: Biography

352 pages, Paperback

Published July 28, 1977

About the author

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Reviews

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Louis-Ferdinand Céline is a writer about which opinion is still polarized after more than half a century. In he 1930s. he wrote two masterpieces -- Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan -- but as the decade progressed and the mood in France grew increasingly sullen, he wrote several anti-Semitic pamphlets. He almost appeared to welcome a Nazi victory. Except for one thing ...

Céline hated everybody. During the Occupation, the Nazis tried to build him up as a great writer, but Céline wasn't having any part of it. He was an anarchist at heart who had said equally damaging things about the Communists and American Capitalists. Naturally, the French Resistance wanted his hide; and after the war, he had to escape with various unsavory Vichy officials to Germany and Denmark. He was arrested and spent time in solitary confinement in Copenhagen before being released.

All this time, Céline was not just a writer: He was a physician concentrating his practice on the illnesses of the poor. Looked at in this light, he was a demonstrably good man -- a sort of irreligious Mother Theresa.

Patrick McCarthy 's Celine: A Biography is probably more a work of literary criticism than biography, but it does cover both in its own way. The writer was never a willing subject for a biographer, even though his is one of the most eventful stories of the 20th Century.

I for one like his work -- and deplore many of his prejudices. In a way, so did Céline: He had many Jewish friends. According to a New Yorker article on the Frenchman:

“Céline is my Proust!” Philip Roth once said. “Even if his anti-Semitism made him an abject, intolerable person. To read him, I have to suspend my Jewish conscience, but I do it, because anti-Semitism isn’t at the heart of his books… . Céline is a great liberator.”

I'll go along with that.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Hitler or {Maurice} Thorez. Does it really matter who gets to be Fuhrer?"---Celine. I once communicated with a lady who told me that "on principle, I refuse to read Celine." Presumably, she meant his anti-semitism. That is like refusing to read Saul Bellow for being a homophobe and Truman Capote (whom Bellow personally loathed) for being homosexual, or Solszhenytsin for being anti-communist or Sohkolov for being a Communist. Patrick McCarthy wrote a political biography of Celine that, without being apologetic for his subject, including his views on the Jewish question in France, poses his politics and art against the background of the slaughter of a generation of one million Frenchmen in World War I, producing in the survivors, especially artists, a vision of the world simultaneously hallucinatory, nihilistic, and brutal. "Celine does not wished to be believed", Andre Gide once wrote about the infamous "Bagatelles Pour un Massacre". "His is a hypereality ", in which political labels are as phony as everything else in life.

[Steve Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the second full-length bio to come out in English (the first was I think Erika Ostrovsky's). It's competent but for such a fiery writer, seems curiously flat. Partly I think this is because McCarthy insists on a "literary" treatment - not what makes Celine fascinating but how he achieves his effects. Well, that's ok, but it's not the real deal say I. Celine peels our illusions away and won't let us have them back. Ostrovsky's not so good bio had a quote from the notebooks of the young Destouches who said he wanted to drag people through the mud so they would be freer, and that focus is the one to start with in any discussion really.

[Leonard Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

No one's ever really going to make sense of the massive jumble of contradictions that was Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which is just how the mean bastard would have wanted it. But McCarthy probably does as good a job as anyone ever will.